‘Gone where?’
‘Well, this stuff is being sent to Claremorris so that would be a good place to start looking, I suppose. Anyway, you’d know more than I would. I was told nothing other than to arrange for his things to be sent on. I came here on Monday and everything was packed up and ready to go. And the new priest arrives in a couple of days and in the meantime I have to get the whole house cleaned and ready for him and you’d swear there were ten of me.’ She sighed and folded her arms. ‘But all I can say is that he was always a gentleman towards me. I never had any problems with him.’ She fussed with the neck of her housecoat when she said this.
Izzy watched the workmen ferrying the boxes from the house to the van.
‘Do you want me to take those?’ Stasia asked.
Izzy stared at her.
‘Those?’ Stasia said, pointing.
Izzy looked down at the three books she held against her side. ‘Oh . . . yes,’ she said, placing her palms against the top and bottom of the pile and carefully handing the books to Stasia, who made a great show of taking them into her arms, like they were much heavier than they really were.
‘I’ll make sure they get to him,’ she said, but she had already turned away from Izzy and was supervising the workmen again, her arms wrapped around the books so they were pressed to her chest, their spines peeping out at Izzy. She turned and began to walk, her arms swinging empty and heavy at her sides. Aware that Stasia was probably watching, she steadied her step and lifted her head, focusing her gaze on her car.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, fastening her seat belt, she heard the doors of the van slam shut, but she could not bring herself to look over at it. To have phoned that morning – that was the thing to have done. How much easier it would have been to hide her alarm and confusion over the phone instead of making a fool of herself in front of Stasia Toomey. Because the whole town would be talking about the priest’s disappearance, and now Stasia would add to that the last-minute arrival of Izzy Keaveney on the scene – how she’d nearly dropped down dead in front of the parochial house when she heard the news. Everyone must have known about his departure already but her. Did James know? she wondered.
She heard the engine of the van starting and some gruff shout echo between the workmen.
Of course he knew, she thought. Of course he knew.
Chapter 20
Eric’s little body was still warm from his bath when Dolores carried him into the sitting room, swaddled in a towel, and laid him down on his changing mat. The water in the tub had soothed the eczema on her hands and she’d slathered them in lotion, and it felt good now to have them occupied in some activity. She pulled her son’s toes and smiled at him and tried not to think of the red welts that bealed between her knuckles.
Madeleine bounded into the room. Dolores knew it was her without looking up, from the frantic swish of her jeans, the breathless energy she carried. Madeleine had been pursuing her all day.
‘Please can I go to Glenties on Friday?’ she asked, for what felt like the hundredth time.
Dolores had calmly resolved not to get angry with her daughter. There had been so much silence and anger in their house these past few months that, where it was possible, she was determined to be gentle and patient with her children.
‘Why can’t I go?’ Madeleine pushed.
‘Because you’re too good-looking,’ Dolores said. ‘They’ll all be after you at that disco.’
And she meant this in a way. Madeleine was turning out to be beautiful – a much finer version of herself. Where her curls were dry and dense, Madeleine’s were soft and silken. Where Dolores’s body tapered, Madeleine’s curved. And if she was anything like Dolores, she was probably fertile too.
‘So you’re jealous?’ Madeleine said. ‘You can’t have any fun anymore, so I’m not allowed to either.’
Madeleine threw herself down on the sofa beside her little sister, who was propped up against a pile of cushions, quietly watching the TV. Jessica slowly turned her wide-eyed gaze on Madeleine, fascinated by this performance. Then as though in a trance she slipped down off the sofa, trailing her blanket after her, and sidled closer to the TV.
‘Of course I’m jealous.’ She held Eric’s ankles between her thumb and middle finger and dusted his arse with talcum powder. ‘I’m six months pregnant and you get to go out and have fun while I’m here with two weans. You have it all ahead of you. And that’s why you can wait. You can wait until you’re sixteen – two more years.’
‘But Ciara and Tara go every week and they’re the same age as me. Tara’s mother won’t even let her get her ears pierced and she’s allowed to go to Glenties!’ And with that she was up again and stamping off down the hall.
Jessica tilted into her eyeline with a listless twirl, having clearly decided that far too much attention was being paid to Madeleine. She was singing softly, just letting out random notes and sounds as she danced.
‘Dolores!’ her husband roared.
Madeleine always went straight to her father when she didn’t get what she wanted.
‘Dolores!’ the shout came again.
She sighed and sat back on her heels. She stared down at her son as he chewed on his bottom lip and held out his arms to her, his little fists flashing open and closed. Dolores pulled a white vest over Eric’s head and then slid him into his sleep suit, pushing his feet down into the legs and poking his hands through the cuffs. When she snapped the buttons closed it formed the picture of a woolly sheep across his chest. She bent down and rubbed her nose against his. ‘Now you’re in your sheep suit,’ she said, ‘and you’re gonna be fast asheep in no time.’
‘Mammy – look the man,’ Jessica said, and Dolores looked over to the window where Jessica was chewing on the windowsill and peering out.
‘Jessica, love, if you’re that hungry, I think it’s time for your dinner.’
Her daughter removed her mouth from the sill, drawing a strand of saliva with her. ‘Look the man, Mammy.’ She was pointing at an empty sky where the light was draining away.
‘What man, love?’ Dolores began tossing objects into the baby bag.
‘Man up there,’ she said – three notes, one high, one low, one high. She jumped up and down and waved her bum around.
Dolores gathered Eric into her arms and groaned as she rose to her feet. She walked to the window and placed her hand on the back of her daughter’s head.
‘Man!’ her daughter said more energetically this time, pointing at the cottage, and Dolores looked out over the waterlogged grass of her front garden and up the hill to where a tall man stood. He had thick grey hair and glasses, and a long camel coat. His nose was hooked, like a crow. He was staring out over the wall with his hands behind his back. And he looked sad. He also looked distinguished. He wore a grey scarf, loosely tied. He obviously had something to do with Colette, and she thought that maybe now she had a fellow of her own she could leave hers alone.
Dolores moved Eric down to her hip out of the way of her bump and rested his bottom into the palm of her hand. She pressed the nail of her thumb into the cracked skin between her knuckles. If she could have gone back to that moment when Colette Crowley had shown up at her house, she would have shooed her from the door like a stray dog. She hadn’t thought for a second that that woman, who was at least ten years older than her and looked every day of it, would have been of interest to any man, especially her husband. She’d never met his other women, the ones who phoned the house and hung up, but she knew from the magazines he brought home what his tastes were. He bought cheap, amateur stuff, with strange eighties throwbacks – women with big perms and sweatbands, wearing leotards with no gusset. And his preference was for the palest and skinniest, the ones with the tiniest tits, and this had been some small comfort to her. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say to her while he fucked her from behind, the magazine laid out on the pillow in front of her face. And if she looked away, he pressed her face down into it. He said it helped him along.
But Colette Crowley was as unlike Dolores as it was possible to be. She was another species altogether. And she wouldn’t look at dirty magazines while you fucked her. Or maybe she would, because Dolores had thought a lot about this – you never did know. When that woman showed up on her doorstep in her ugly woollen skirt and her roll-neck jumper and her big mop of black hair with the greys showing – and that fucking saddlebag – she’d thought nothing of her. And then as soon as she told her mother and her sisters that they were renting the cottage to Colette Crowley they started making jokes. ‘Oh, she’s a fine one to have living next door to you – lock up your husbands – she’s man-mad that one.’ Her mother also told her Colette had lost a child. Cot death, she said it was. Dolores had gone cold when she heard that, would not have wished it on anyone, but there was the feeling too that this woman up in the cottage was cursed and Dolores had invited her in. And she’d had nothing but trouble since.
And after her mother and her sisters told her these things it was like every time she saw Colette she noticed something new about her. Her blue eyes were flecked with light, like glass shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Her skin was pale and tired, but so smooth and even and white, like it would cool your hands just to touch them there. And those long, fine teeth, so clean and neat and evenly spaced in her mouth. She came to the house a lot these days, looking for something – Donal, Dolores guessed. And one day shortly before Christmas she had come looking for a spare key for the cottage. She had locked herself out after a walk on the beach, or at least that’s what she said. And when Dolores handed Colette the keys, she noticed how long her fingers were. Elegant, that’s what Colette was. She could see now too, because she had reason to pay closer attention, that beneath the layers of wool were rounded curves and length of bone and pleasure to be had.
It was that visit that first made her think something was wrong. Colette was distracted, looking over her shoulder. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned that she was locked out of her house. She was a little unsteady too and Dolores thought she might have had drink taken. She had that kind of purpose about her, like she’d fixed on an idea and now didn’t quite know how to put it into action. Dolores felt that if she hadn’t been standing there, Colette would have just barrelled through the door. She noticed too, with some satisfaction, that Colette had gained weight. And watching Colette clamber back up the hill to the cottage, she thought of all the times herself and Donal had gone up there to have sex in the afternoon. He’d start agitating for it and he didn’t care if the kids were around. But she did. If she got the youngest two down for a sleep and Madeleine was at home, she’d sneak off up to the cottage with him.
At first, when he’d stopped wanting sex from her, she’d been relieved. She thought it might have been him being considerate for once because she was pregnant again. And maybe it was him being considerate. He had to get it somewhere, that’s the way he’d look at it, and wasn’t it better for him to be off with some other woman than bothering her while she was six months gone? It took a while for the two ideas to marry in her head, that the woman in the cottage was the woman he was sleeping with. But then she came down to the house on Christmas Eve and started shouting at Shaun on the phone. Dolores had watched them from the living room, had heard the cruel way Donal dismissed her from the house. And she said it to herself there and then: they’re fucking.
